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Extreme climber Dean Potter dies in Yosemite BASE-jumping mishap

Dean Potter was legendary for his dangerous exploits, but a wingsuit attempt Saturday at Yosemite National Park led to his death.

Outdoor adventurer Dean Potter, seen here in 2012 at a highlining event, died Saturday while attempting a wingsuit flight in Yosemite National Park in California. (Hao Tongqian / TNS)

By Sarah KaplanThe Washington Post

Mon., May 18, 2015

Yet again Dean Potter was hurtling through the air. A dead tree stood on the ground below him, a strange tug at the space between his shoulders came from above.

Potter, already a famous rock climber, had had this dream night after night. He believed it was a premonition of his death, he told ESPN in 2008. But instead of running away from the possibility, he ran — or rather, jumped — toward it.

After years of climbing, he began the even riskier sport of BASE-jumping, which involves leaping off cliffs and manmade structures and not deploying a parachute until the last moment.

In the end, Potter’s recurring dream proved prophetic. On Saturday evening he died in a BASE-jumping mishap at Yosemite National Park when he and fellow jumper Graham Hunt, equipped with webbed “wingsuits,” failed to clear at a notch off a high cliff and slammed into the rock face instead.

The bodies of Potter, 43, and Hunt, 29, were found below Taft Point. Their parachutes had not been deployed.

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Potter had spent a decade leaping from the highest cliffs he could find. When he wore a wingsuit, he resembled a giant flying squirrel, head angled down, arms outstretched, coming the closest a human ever has to soaring like a bird.

Metres from the ground, when he finally deployed his parachute, the sensation of the canopy catching him echoed the feeling from his dreams, that tugging between the shoulder blades. He wasn’t dying in the dreams — he was flying.

“I know it’s insane to think that I could fly,” Potter told ESPN. “But to make it possible, you truly have to believe in it — to go to a place that’s not accepted.”

That was the guiding principle of Potter’s climbing career: pursue the impossible, regardless of what the law, fellow climbers and the rules of physics had to say about it.

Potter began climbing at 16 on granite cliffs in New Hampshire. Characteristically, the climbs were both illegal (the cliffs were part of a military reserve) and incredibly risky: Potter was scrambling up the cliff face with no harness and with ropes dug up in a friend’s garage.

“Some older guys … ran into us and said, ‘Damn kids, you guys are going to die!’ ” he recalled to Outside magazine in 2011.

Potter briefly stopped climbing in 1990, when he entered the University of New Hampshire. But he soon dropped out, opting for the free-spirited life of the “dirtbag” climber. Everything he earned went to climbing trips, and by the early 2000s, Potter was one of the top climbers in the world. He set records for climbing challenging routes fast and without a rope — “speed soloing.”

“I had a unique style. I didn’t care about how things were done in the past, and I just did what felt natural, ‘No Rules’ once again,” he wrote about the new method in a blog post for FiveTen, a climbing shoe company that sponsored him.

Other climbers started calling him the “Dark Wizard,” a nod to both his brooding intensity and his seemingly superhuman athletic feats. Along with BASE jumping, Potter was a pioneer of highlining — tightrope walking between two points on cliffs. “You slip, you die,” he said.

Despite the risks he regularly took, Potter always said he didn’t have a death wish.

“I’m addicted to the heightened awareness I get when there’s a death consequence,” he told ESPN. “My vision is sharper, and I’m more sensitive to sounds, my sense of balance and the beauty all around me.”

In recent years, Potter had switched to wingsuit BASE-jumping. A video of him jumping with his dog, Whisper, went viral last year.

“Lately I think of myself as more bird than human,” he wrote in a blog post.

But he lamented that he couldn’t “fully spread my wings in ‘The Land of the Free’ ” — an oblique reference to the ban against BASE jumping in U.S. national parks.

However, BASE insiders say jumps still happen at night in national parks, when the risk of being caught by rangers is lower. That appears to be what Potter and Hunt were doing Saturday evening.

Yosemite official Mike Gauthier said the pair’s spotter heard what sounded like impacts but could also have been parachutes snapping open. When the two didn’t respond to radio calls and didn’t show up at a designated meeting place, she contacted the park.

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